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Yeah, I goggled a bit at that one too. Particularly when it's immediately followed by a complaint about things being modified unexpectedly. Some of the complai

Yeah, I goggled a bit at that one too. Particularly when it's immediately followed by a complaint about things being modified unexpectedly. Some of the complaints are not really issues, eg. you can comment out loops by adding an "if 0:" after commenting out the top line, or else surrounding it with triple quotes """...""". [5] is an outright lie. Major Python apps support 2.4 onwards, true, but virtualenv (a common piece of Python infrastructure) can support arbitrary libraries and versions of python: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1534210/use-different-python-version-with-virtualenv http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1534210/use-different-pyt.... And I've never heard of duck typing 'auto casting' anything - code example? Most of the rest is either a style thing, eg. "lambdas are broken!" (Just define a function first then use it, or use a decorator. You can't write lisp in python), or else broken in other languages too. [4.5] is true for any language, including compiled statically typed languages, not just Python.

pnathan 15y ago
Python mixes immutability and mutability in ways that require careful thinking about the problem if you want to write unbuggy code. E.g., does a tuple holding lists allow modification of the member lists? Intuitively, it would seem to me that immutability should cascade, but thinking about tuples as holding a bag of pointers suggests that the lists are still mutable. Anyway. I generally take the position that if you have to work around something in your language, it's broken. E.g., the virtualenv hack. It's nice to deploy out an exe and not require a whole ecosystem to be install in order to bootstrap it up. Happy hacking.
- j-kidd 15y ago
  Virtualenv is a pragmatic approach to solve actual problems during both development and deployment. As long as you have a python executable (don't have to be installed system-wide) and the virtualenv.py module, you can create a virtualenv. How is that "a whole ecosystem"?
- anthonyb 15y ago
  Virtualenv isn't a hack. How else would you run multiple different versions of Python or a library?

pnathan 15y ago

Python mixes immutability and mutability in ways that require careful thinking about the problem if you want to write unbuggy code. E.g., does a tuple holding lists allow modification of the member lists? Intuitively, it would seem to me that immutability should cascade, but thinking about tuples as holding a bag of pointers suggests that the lists are still mutable. Anyway. I generally take the position that if you have to work around something in your language, it's broken. E.g., the virtualenv hack. It's nice to deploy out an exe and not require a whole ecosystem to be install in order to bootstrap it up. Happy hacking.

j-kidd 15y ago
Virtualenv is a pragmatic approach to solve actual problems during both development and deployment. As long as you have a python executable (don't have to be installed system-wide) and the virtualenv.py module, you can create a virtualenv. How is that "a whole ecosystem"?
anthonyb 15y ago
Virtualenv isn't a hack. How else would you run multiple different versions of Python or a library?